Jyoti Mishra's website

Year: 2013

This is the last day of this year so it seemed appropriate to stick the last video up from ‘Monopole’ today.

In December 2010, I filmed the first video for ‘Monopole,’ ‘Cut Out My Heart.’

Three years on and I’ve done what I set out to do, make a video for each of the eleven tracks on the album. It’s been a difficult process but I’ve learned loads through taking it on. Which is why I did it, of course.

When I look at the early vids, part of me imagines the better edit I could do now, the more consistent framing or cinematography. But each one was the best I could do at the time and like every album and every song I’ve ever written, I’m proud of them all.

‘Anywhere But Here’ is the last song on ‘Monopole’ as well as being the last to have a video made. I remember recording it one afternoon. I felt like my heart was freezing inside me, this dreadful coldness and weight. I imagined it like a great iceberg, calving into the sea.

So I set up one mic and sang this song. One mic, one take, one track. No autotune, no massaging, no fucking editing. My voice is my voice, my guitar is my guitar.

All I have left is my honesty, I don’t ever now if I even had the truth.

31. Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! – Pardon My FrenchWherein the cheeky French chappies show the world of poppunk how to make an album that is both poppy *and* a progression from the previous one. Take note, connardzzz!

26. Mixtapes – Ordinary SilenceGenres are funny things, aren’t they? If Mixtapes were Brits, they’d probably be touring with Martha and playing Indietracks. As it is, they remain a cruelly-slept-on and wonderful poppunk beat combo.

24. Deafheaven – SunbatherMetalgaze may seem like a peculiar genre for me to embrace but all I know is that this album makes my head hurt in a quite beautiful way. I’m surprised it doesn’t give me nosebleeds.

23. The Pastels – Slow SummitsHow the fuck have The Pastels kept making sublime pop songs for over thirty years now? MOTHERFUCKERS!

22. Disclosure – SettleI first heard Disclosure out clubbing and having their beats shake my guts is the best way to experience them, I fell in love then. Thankfully, so did Radio One so you’ll know most of this album of hooky electropop already.

21. Kettel – Ibb & ObbI think this is the first ever time I’ve had a soundtrack album in a best of and one for a video game at that. I haven’t played the game but I can tell you that this one hour and fourteen minutes of Kettel is magical.

20. Rogue Wave – Nightingale FloorsI can’t believe I’ve loved Rogue Wave for a decade now. Fuck. I also can’t believe they can still make pop songs as effervescently summery as ‘College.’ Looking forward to the next decade, peeps.

19. Moderat – IIApparat’s 2013 album was on my list but fell off the bottom but his second collab with Modeselektor makes it because it’s shitloads poppier. You know, for kids.

18. Black Milk – No Poison No ParadiseSteady-footed, sureshot hip hop that is, like all the best hip hop, unafraid of fucking with you, your ears or your lyrical and sonic preconceptions. If you prefer your genres monolithic, best avoided.

17. Altars – Something MoreThis is my top shouty album this year and it’s because I’ve listened to it the most, mostly on emowalks. I’ll skip through my iPhone, trying to find something heavy but also something that’ll involve me over the length of the album. An actual album rather than a collation of potential singles.

Altars have delivered that with ‘Something More.’ And, like all my fave albums this year, they wrongfoot me continually. On ‘Sent To Destroy,’ the song morphs into an almost DM bridge before the coda. Lovely!

16. Fuck Buttons – Slow FocusMaaaan, if I could see a gig with these, Deafheaven, Pelican and Russian Circles, I think I could easily die and be transported straight to the Valhalla of marvellously epic soundtracks to asteroid storms. FB’s synths peep out of their flight cases, longing to taste your vanilla marrow.

15. Factory Floor – Factory FloorStark, naked electronics that eschew dreaminess for pounding icicles into your ears. Semiquavers all over the fucking shop, hardsynced arpeggios that enrich in their passing-note minimalism. I love the dancefloor imperative here, so often avoided by chin-stroking IDMers. Fuck that shit.

14. The Front Bottoms – Talon Of The HawkAgain, dunno where these bleeders would be if they were Brits, they’re so hard to pigeonhole. Of course punk, of course indie in the non-NME-haircut-band sense. Ultimately, it’s the narratives that draw one in, as voyeur and conspirator.

“I wanna be stronger than your Dad was for your Mom.”

Fuck.

13. Gesaffelstein – AlephListen to ‘Pursuit’ off ‘Aleph’ and it’s everything I love about electronic music: it’s robotic, funky, machined, precise, relentless, repetitive and undeniable. It’s the kind of track I avoid listening to when I’m driving on motorways because it makes me want to drive faster and faster, searching for some road/strobe synchronicity. ‘Hellifornia’ reminds me of Huroratron at his stupidest but even bleaker and even less human. Beautiful.

I seriously wish I had made this album.

12. Everything Everything – ArcI’ll admit, it took me a while to get into ‘Arc.’ I emowalked it a few times and nothing really clicked. But gradually, I found myself singing bits from it in my very awful fractured falsetto. It crept up on me like the NSA, rifled through my brain and left behind a series of pictures of cats and Manchurian Candidate trigger words.

“And that eureka moment hits you like a cop car.”

11. CHVRCHES – The Bones Of What You BelieveArgh, this album makes me mad. Firstly, because I’m jealous that Chvrches have melded a beautiful, delicate female vocal with rich, melodic synthpop. I’ve been trying to find a female singer for over a decade now but one just can’t find the staff nowadays, donchaknow.

Secondly, Chvrches annoy me because they’re too good. I’ve never seen Mayberry’s bands but I saw Aereogramme live and they were also awesome at what they did, the fuckers. And The Twilight Sad are beautiful! How are Chvrches equally good? It really isn’t fair, is it?

Thirdly, and lastly, you may think you’ve heard all the popness from this album on the radio. You haven’t. It’s all fucking poppy. ‘We Sink’ is easily as catchy as any of the singles.

The fuckers.

10. Latyrx – The Second AlbumWherein Lateef and Lyrics Born shit over their biters, detractors and debtors with a hippo-sized spray of ideas, any one of which most other artists would stretch out for a song rather than for a line.

‘Deliberate Gibberish’ is a masterclass in saying, ‘oh, you want to go there ~ sure, we can go there… huh, why?’ Contrast that with tracks actually about the non-rap world, less meta and more matter and that will give you the breadth of this album.

All of that would leave me interested but cold if it wasn’t laced up with some simply golden soundscapes. It all fits together, no gaps, no filler, no fucking about.

9. The State Champs – The Finer ThingsAs you can tell, this has been a fine year for new poppunk. The State Champs album builds on their earlier super-catchiness with more riffs, cleaner, clearer dynamics and lyrics that bleed poppunk:

“I fell asleep in a city that doesn’tThought I was special but you know I wasn’t.”

They sound more assured, more focussed and like their heads are up and they’re ready to take on the world.

8. Cloud Control – Dream CaveThis album wraps me up, it’s kept me warm on cold walks. Cloud Control lazily brilliant in that these songs don’t sound written, they sound like they’ve been discovered. In the saucily-titled ‘Dojo Rising,’ the slamming car-door drums form a perfect anchor for the stacks of harmonies, guitar noodling and almost gospel piano figures.

But through the album, Cloud Control pull this magic trick again and again, directing the listener in one direction, making us think we know what’s going to happen but they they sneak all kinds of twinkling frippery in to the soundscape. It’s often harmonies but it might be a cheesy organ arpeggio or even a super-wibbly guitar solo.

Look, if you hate Cali harmonies and sunshine, you’re going to loathe this album. But if you’ve ever sung along to the ‘baa-baa-baaaaaa’ bit of any pop song ever, this album is pretty much an essential purchase.

7. Serengeti – Kenny Dennis LPSerengeti expands on the debut EP of his alter-ego Kenny Dennis with a whole album. When I first heard Kenny, I didn’t know who the fuck it was. I actually thought it was Carl from ATHF. Or maybe big moustache dude from The Lordz of Brooklyn But while there are undoubtedly similarities in the Fauvist declamations these characters make, this album takes KD’s character to a different place.

We get a lot more of Kenny’s story and a lot of it isn’t played for laughs. It’s a strange journey, I started listening to the album expecting more lols and by halfway through I was genuinely sad for the dude.

Even though he doesn’t exist.

6. Bastille – Bad BloodThis is a vast, muscular steamroller of a pop album. Look, you’ll know all these songs from their breakthrough ‘Pompeii’ through ‘Laura Palmer’ and the other singles.

They are undeniably poppy. I’ve sung along to this album so many times in my car, trying to match singer dude trill for trill, serious face for serious face. Can’t do it. I can almost do it but… no…

And that’s where Bastille overtake their mainstream indie peers. The other bands nipping at their heels may have the looks and the quiffs and the pipe cleaner bodies de-rigeur for the genre but Bastille have better songs.

One thing, though ~ if they don’t release ‘Weight Of Living II’ as a single, they’re idiots. C’mon!

5. The Little Ones – The Dawn Sang AlongThe Little Ones take the US alt-indie-rock blueprint and stuff it as full of melody, twiddly bits and harmonies as Bastille do for the UK counterpart. Now, whether they over-egg the pudding is a matter of taste. For me, they’re spot on. Sounds like ‘Boy On Wheel’ are just the right side of smug to still be winsome. But then, I love indiepop, which is blatantly what this album is, albeit with different production values.

This is an album for picnics, road-trip singsongs and pretending your life is actually way more fun than it is. Often, as I’ve been walking, soaked by the rain and whipped by the wind, just hearing the synthbass of ‘Little Souls’ will cheer me up with its Sailor-like joy.

I guess the most obvious comparisons would be old MGMT or now Vampire Weekend but that’s only an approximation. I find The Little Ones to be way poppier and less arch than either of those acts. That’s both refreshing and liberating.

4. Real Friends – Put Yourself Back TogetherI guess I’m pretty fucking emo because I’m hooked on Real Friends’ brutally, despairingly honest lyrics. You can’t be this honest in mainstream indie because everything there is arch / ironic / a Duran Duran reference. What poppunk bands like Real Friends do is flense the flesh from their skinny mallrat bodies to provide some kind of zomboid emotional meat for us to swallow.

Sometimes… well, most of the time, that is disturbing. I find myself singing along to something like:

“Maybe I’ll run away from it all and fake my own death, see if you really careA week goes by and I doubt if you’ll be waiting at all……because everything you said was a lie.”

..and I catch myself and think, what the fuck? I’m not a kid, why does this connect? But like their peers TSSF, Real Friends have a way of singing what you feel and making you deal with it, even though it’s often ugly, stupid and clumsy.

But at least it’s honest.

“I write songs about you all the time,I bet I don’t even run through your mind.…It’s been a lonely year…”

*sigh*

3. Ghettosocks – For You Pretty ThingsVery, very nearly my fave hip hop of 2013, Ghettosocks’ ‘FYPT’ is a solid monster, seventeen tracks of intricate beats, deft rhyming and IDEAS. It doesn’t matter if he’s over a Premier-style minimal jazz beat like ‘Youth In Asia’ or feelgood Ugly Duckling groove like ‘Human Sacrifice,’ Ghettosocks remains unflappable, unstoppable. And he’s also a great relationship counsellor:

“I’m down for trips to the zoo and boob touching,but ain’t you heard the old saying: fools rush in?”

The guests flesh out the album but always complement rather than dominate. Some albums suffer from acute guesteritis, hoping to cover over deficiencies with a list of known names. This isn’t one of them. Whether it’s El Da Sensei, Sadat X, Moka Only or whoever, the collab is always natural and fun. Less business, more smiles.

Hats off to the track ‘Poutine’ for combining the Canadian delicacy with delicious synth blarts. It’s these little jumps and skips, turning left instead of right that make ‘FYPT’ consistent, stupid fun.

2. Verb T – I RemainWhat the fuck? Verb T released ‘The Morning Process’ last year and it reached number three on my best albums of 2012. Now, here he is with a whole new album!

If you like UK hip hop, you’ve probably been listening to Verb for years, even if you didn’t know it. Whether it’s with Braintax, Food Records, Low Life or, now, High Focus, he’s been consistently brilliant. And on this new album, he’s even self-producing the beats, a fact he plays up nicely on the middle skit of ‘Toast Jazz.’

Just watch this vid for ‘Old And Grumpy’:

This is why I fucking love Verb T:

“Ooh, you getting fucked up?Cor, that’s exciting!Gang of weird kids on horse tranquillisers,False advertising, saying that it’s popping off,Dancing about dressed up like a proper knob,Wear what ya want,But i don’t see why your kid,Tuck his jeans in his socks,If he ain’t a cyclistFrame ain’t changed but you wear tighter shitOnce XL, now you’re medium, why is this?Why is it relevant who your designer is?Oh I see!Cos there’s eager kids buying this.”

More than anything, I love Verb T because he is who he is. So many Brits sing in fake American accents, so many Brits rap with fake American twangs or drop slang no bugger who lives here uses. Verb T, on the other hand, drops ‘cor’ and ‘proper knob’ into his rhyme and I’m laughing as I’m listening as I’m loving as I am understanding.

He also pulls off the same trick Braintax managed with aplomb: he preaches truth whilst never, ever, for even a nanosecond claiming he’s better than the divs he’s criticising. That’s a move of some finesse, those are acrobatics most rappers flail at, flip-flopping from self-proclaimed messiah to proud fuck-up, all the while their eyes on the headlines.

I cannot believe he’s come out with this whole new album in a year. It makes me feel stupidly un-productive in that he can maintain this quality level and output. All I want now is a new Four Owls album. Maaaaaan.

If you buy only one hip hop album from 2013, make sure this is it.

1. Baths – ObsidianOkay, I’m a sucker for synthpop, electro, whatever you goddamn kids call it this week. I’m also a sucker for immaculate, perfect pop songs that are as unsettling as they are catchy. That’s why Baths’ ‘Obsidian’ is my number one album of 2013. Will Weisenfeld, the genius behind Baths wraps the most painful of private confessions in the most perfect sugar coatings. If there is a modern-day heir to Gore’s ‘Black Celebration’ electro-goth noir, it’s Baths. Look, if you really want a cookie-cutter, easy-sell handle about it, imagine a very depressed, maimingly honest Postal Service with 100% more lyrics about needy erections.

This is my top album partly because it’s been the key to my lock. When you’re walking around your suburb hoping you’ll be Regina Georged by a passing bus, you need lyrics in your ears that aren’t facile. You don’t care if they’re uncomfortable or scratchy, crawling into your head and tickling alive memories you thought you’d drowned, as long as they’re real. You need lyrics like this:

“You don’t do anything with your lifeFascinating, terrible – your stupid idling mindI can prod your hurt all nightOr resign and findAny other stupid thing to do with my timeI was never poetic and never kind

Scared of how little I care for youScared of how little I care for youScared of how little I care for youI am elsewhere.”

Please check out ‘Miasma Sky’ if nothing else from this album. I cannot believe any human who has ever loved pop music will be immune to its skittering, baleful charms.

Apart from that, I find it hard to single out what to recommend from an album of such riches. A lot of people have and will call this a depressing album. I don’t feel it to be. On the contrary, at my lowest ebb, this album has come to me at random times and punched me on the arm and made me feel a little less ridiculous and ugly.

“It gets all in the way, the pit in my throatThis isn’t the adulthood I thought I wroteAnd I never see your face, but I just might be okay with thatI have no eyes, I have no love, I have no hope

And it is not a matter ofIf you need itBut it is only a matter ofCome and fuck meAnd it is not a matter ofIf you love meBut it is only a matter ofMy fix.”

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Where does love come from? Who knows? It arrives on a breeze, as gentle as an egret and as heavy as a squirming walrus. Sometimes it arrives by Kik…

Stacie BARBOUR said I looked sexy. She said she was so turned on right now. She said her pussy was soaking wet right now.

My heart galloped. Could it be, finally, that I had met the new love of my life? She had seen my tiny Kik profile pic and had immediately become severely aroused, her very vulva becoming uncontrollably moist.

This boded well for me ~ if her passion was this strong before I had even uttered more than a couple of sentences to her, imagine her ardour when we actually met! Oh, the sweet explosions of joy that would ensue when our lips finally found each other, like hungry lampreys in the Sargasso sea.

Stacie wanted to see a picture of me. In my haste to reply, I said I was going to come my chest hair rather than comb it. But Stacie, angel in human form that she was, forbore my clumsy typings. She knew I was too excited to be accurate, we were both carried away by this tide of raw emotion and overflowing vaginal lubrication.

Stacie, the imp, told me how she wanted my manhood. She wanted it a lot. I sent her a seductive picture of myself imagining the honeyed glide of intromission.

But it was not to be. Stacie wanted to take our relationship to a whole new level with which I was uncomfortable. A level of webcams, credit cards, possible major hacking of my bank accounts and suchlike.

Is all love doomed?

I fear it might be.

Though our relationship lasted only a few minutes and was entirely fictional, it was deeper and sweeter than most couples I know. In those brief moments, our minds were as one, our bodies, though separated by time and space, were entwined in the grace of universal lovers.

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I’ve just done an interview with the lovely Sherryn from the Best Of Baltimore Blog. You can read it in full here. Here’s the intro which is lovely for an egomaniac like me to read:

“Is anyone else on the inter-webs excited about White Town’s newest album? I know I am not the only one since I grew up with ALOT of White Town fans! White Town’s newest album, Monopole, has multiple tracks drenched in ebullience, love and remorse and it’s crafted so well that I assure you, it will stick closely inside your head for days. Yes, it’s that good!”

Have a read of the rest of it, I ramble on about New York, being a musician, my usual blather. 😀

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I first fell in love when I was fiteen/sixteen and it was inevitably un-requited. This Friday, I was interviewed regarding my writing this song and I found myself talking about my first love. As I talked about her, I realised I remembered every detail about her. Her hair, her dimples, her enchanting lisp, the gorgeous shade of pink she’d go if she had to answer a question in school, her braces, and the tremendous strain her valiant blouse buttons underwent to contain what I thought, at that age, were surely the biggest breasts in the entire world.

I was a kid, we were both kids. I’m sure if I saw a picture of her now as she was then, she’d look like… a kid.

She was the first girl I wrote a song about.

Since then, I’ve fallen in love at least another… eight times! Fuck! That seems like a huge number! But bear in mind that I am 47 now and that I was married for 11 years (together for 14) during that list of massive infarctions. Six of those times were over nineteen years ago so the rate of me drowning in someone’s eyes does seem to be slowing of late.

I guess my serial amory is part of who I am: I’m a songwriter who sings mostly about love. I seem to feel things more than the average person, I have higher highs and lower lows. Where others shake off lovers / relationships / pain / love, I can’t seem to. I stay stuck until I work through everything, usually through putting everything into songs and trying to invent a narrative for what is, in reality, the normal chaos of love. Even then, I don’t “move on” like mature adults are meant to: if any of those girls/women turned up on my doorstep this evening, I’d gladly ask them in, hug them and love them as much as I did way back when. Weird, I know.

Out of those eight times, only four have been requited.

Oh, unrequited love! I could fill so many anguished diary pages with the will-it-blend? assault on my heart those loves brought. I could and I have: please make sure your burn those diaries when my body is found, they make Tumblr look sober.

This is how I know I’m in love:

She’s the last thing I think about as I’m falling asleep.

She’s the first thing I think about when I wake.

Every moment she’s not here, there’s a dull ache inside me, like I’ve left something somewhere but can’t remember what and where.

If I see someone with the same name as her on the telly or a film or Twitter, my heart leaps.

If I miss a call from her, I start panicking and my heart jumps like a skittish frog. Then, when I call her, she’s all chill and I’m yammering like Rainman.

When she texts me and I see her name come up on my phone, it’s like the sun breaking through the grey after a rainstorm, nothing is bad any more.

When I see her, when I actually see her in the real, actual, atoms-of-her-body-bouncing-light-into-my-eyes way, it hurts because she’s so pretty. I can’t breathe, I can’t think, I want to crush her with hugs and never let her go.

When she says she loves me, I feel the universe unfold and flower, galaxies sparkling chrome in her steady gaze. Every blink seems to take a thousand years.

When she holds my hand, I am calm. We could be sailing into a black hole or about to be ravaged by rabid dogs, still I am calm. What could hurt us through this love?

When she kisses me, it is shocking. I’m blind, all I can feel are her lips on my skin and a wave of sudden heat passing over me, the splash of a firework on a velvet sky. Every when is now, the kiss will be everywhen.

I wouldn’t say I’m addicted to love but I would say that I welcome it into my life. It is the central engine of my life. Actually, I suspect it is for most humans but modern capitalism has made it a sin to say so: we’re programmed to spew the cant that whatever tasks we perform as wage slaves define who we are.

They don’t. Love is what makes you who you are.

Moreover, a loveless human cannot help but be alienated from their work because creation is an act of love. Sever the bond between love and work and you end up with anomie and reality TV: empty, inimical shite.

I am not in a romantic or sexual relationship now and I haven’t been for five years. So, in that sense, I am unloved. But I have love in my life because I am in love. Yes, sometimes that hurts terribly ~ when is wanting what you can’t have ever not painful? Nevertheless, I love love and I would not live without it, no matter how many times I may say that I would.

I know my love will read this and she’ll probably shake her head at my foolishness. In her eyes, she’s just a girl, ordinary and unremarkable. She can’t equate that with the hyperbole of the poems and songs I’ve written about her, the words and worlds that roll out of my mouth when I see her.

This is the best thing about love.

Love can show another human being aspects of themselves that they cannot see themselves due to propinquity or habitude. When I sing her something and she smiles, she understands. I know that apperception will melt away like a snowflake’s kiss. We are all such masses of debits and doubts, none of us truly believes we are worthy of love, which is why it shocks us so and why the belief in love evaporates so disastrously quickly.

But when I’m honest, when I let pure love pour out, too stupefied to barricade it, something happens. I know, for a second at least, love has shown her how extraordinarily, preternaturally wonderful she is.